Pierre Bonnard

Pierre Bonnard’s paintings are today considered to be the work of a highly versatile artist of the modern era who continues to surprise and attract new generations of art lovers and artists throughout the world. His way of painting people and landscapes suggests a careful balancing act between observing, capturing and translating nature into vibrant colours and interrelated forms.

Bonnard was a founding member of the experimental artists’ group known as the Nabis, who were young admirers of Paul Gauguin — painters and sculptors such as Paul Sérusier, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Aristide Maillol and Félix Vallotton. Bonnard and Vuillard in particular were close friends and both developed a new type of intimate, psychologically charged rendering of interiors. Bonnard considered his art to be individual, full of meaning, and of a significance transcending a single time or place.

At the time Bonnard started his artistic career, Paris was the centre of the modern world. It was 1889, the year of the Exposition universelle, a world’s fair organised to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution and to boost the national economy and culture. Bonnard and his Nabi friends assimilated the multicultural, cosmopolitan spirit of the time and the city’s new lifestyle, transposing it into their art — a taste for decorative pictorial motifs borrowed from contemporary design, an interest in Japanese art and, not least of all, an inclination to move between subjects inspired by the fast-moving urban surrounds and scenes of leisure, at home or in the country. They were inventing a new definition of art as a form of creation embracing the broad areas of human life and culture: literature, theatre, music, dance, photography, applied art, interior design, fashion design, and more. For example, the entire Nabi group began to produce illustrations and to design covers for the literary and artistic journal La Revue blanche — with Bonnard and Vuillard working closely together. As Bonnard said: ‘Our generation always sought the correspondences between art and life. At this period I personally had a notion of popular production and an art of function: graphic art, furniture, fans, screens, etc.’¹

Modern Life

From 1895 onward, street scenes, as the visible, public side of modern life, and interiors and small genre scenes, as the private, secret side of it, dominated Bonnard’s work. His interest in his Paris street environment is clear in the lithographic screen Nannies’ Promenade, Frieze of Carriages 1895/99 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gift of Margaret Olley). He wrote to his mother in 1894, when he created a draft for this print in distemper on canvas: ‘I’m making a screen for the Champ-de-Mars [the Salon des Indépendants]. In any case it will be for the present time the eighth wonder of the world.’² Like many of his friends — artists, writers, critics, composers — Bonnard was constantly observing and commenting on daily life. Eager to capture striking phenomena for his art, he collected the sensations of the city. Rather than focusing on a single event or object, his was a ‘mobile vision’³, with eyes always active, continuously moving, literally hunting new images.

Bonnard’s genre scenes and individual portraits were inspired by the ambience of his private life, his family, his lover Marthe (Maria Boursin, whom he met in 1893), and his friends in different intellectual and cultural milieux; whereas his group portraits and street scenes were infused by the rhythm, energy, and events of public life in the urban environment. He is not so much providing a faithful description of the energy of urban life, in the older tradition of the Impressionists, as he is seeking to depict that energy in a thrilling decorative form and in a modern figurative style.

Bonnard spent holidays in his parents’ house, Le Clos, at Le Grand-Lemps in the Dauphiné. Many of his interiors and landscapes are infused with the light and lushness of this rural region between Lyons and Grenoble. He was much attached to the house and his stays there were always artistically productive.

Nudes

In sharp contrast to depictions of bourgeois life, leisure, and children’s games in the garden of Le Clos, Bonnard painted voluptuous, almost risqué images of nudes, in his Paris studio and in the house he had rented at Morval outside the city. Marthe, his model, usually appears in the bathroom, in the tub or stepping out of it. The emotional atmosphere in these interiors varies from erotic and intimate to private and solitary.

Bonnard’s nudes are often distinguished from contemporaneous academic nudes through his unorthodox, sensual approach to the female body. Considered very progressive, his nudes made him famous among patrons and collectors.

Decorative Landscapes and Interiors

Around 1900, together with Vuillard, Denis and Roussel, Bonnard was sought after as a painter of decorative landscapes showing urban settings such as parks, squares or boulevards, frequently with groups of figures. In 1906 Bonnard started work on four monumental panels for the apartment of Misia and Alfred Edwards, at 21 quai Voltaire in Paris. Here, in the dining room, he installed dozens of abundant forms and figures, including, fauns, nymphs, bathers, dancers, and exotic animals in a tropical nature. This group of panels and other such decorative works are important not only because they expand the program of traditional easel painting, responding instead to a broader iconographic schema, but also because they are part of a large ensemble, conceived to fit a particular interior. It is interesting to compare the decorative style of Bonnard to that of Henri Matisse who, by about 1905 after adopting the garish colours of the Fauves, was considered to be among the most important avant-garde painters.

A number of Bonnard’s interiors can be seen as daring answers to his friend Matisse’s conception of space. In 1910 Bonnard began to develop a group of interiors depicting contemplative figures in a room. Whereas the interiors of the Nabi years are small in scale and private in ambience, these later works are more public, less intimate. They have a stagelike effect, with Bonnard presenting his characters proudly to the viewer. Marthe becomes almost an actress, whether seen in the shadow of a playful little white cat, Woman with Cat 1912, or in a more active, emancipated role where, elegantly dressed, as in The Red Blouse 1925, she dominates the scene. No longer implanted in a private, restricted environment, Bonnard’s figures are exposed to reality. No children appear, the scenes are open and less intimate, gaslight is replaced by dazzling electric light. People are less subordinated to space and more involved in a balanced dialogue with the object world.

Bonnard undertook fewer decorative projects in the 1920s, but his decorative style spread beyond panels designed for specific interiors into the often large-scale landscapes that he had begun to paint in the village of Vernonnet where he frequently worked in these years, having acquired a little house there in 1912. Vernonnet is on the Seine near Vernon, a few kilometres west of Giverny, where Monet had lived and worked for almost 30 years. The two men became close friends. Unlike Monet though, Bonnard did not grow a carefully planned garden. At his house in Vernonnet, Ma Roulotte (My Caravan), the garden was an overgrown jungle of wildflowers, brush and trees. Bonnard painted the view from his window, from the large balcony, from the neighbouring hills. He captured the lush vegetation of the Seine valley, often showing a lesser interest in topographical details.

Paintings like Balcony at Vernonnet c.1920 resonate with Bonnard’s ambition to capture the region’s riotous vegetation and to filter and transform it into a well-structured composition. The impression of a wild patch of nature full of colour and light — a chaotic structure — is only one’s first, superficial sense of the picture; a second reading of this and many similar works from Vernonnet reveals a carefully developed, highly sophisticated composition. The dialogue between architecture and nature, wildness and domesticity, people and landscape, is sublimely expressed.

In the summer of 1909, following the example of other painters of his generation — Matisse, Paul Signac, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet — whose art had been influenced by the light and environment of the Mediterranean coast, Bonnard worked for the first time in Saint-Tropez. His discovery of the radiant light and luminous colour of the South of France, so different from northern Europe, was a key experience for him and he returned to this region, the Midi, year after year. He would continue to work and exhibit in Paris, but he travelled a lot and spent long periods with Marthe in Vernonnet. On 15 August 1925, in Paris, Bonnard and Marthe were married.

Le Cannet

In 1926 Bonnard bought a house, Le Bosquet (The Grove), in Le Cannet on the Côte d’Azur not far from Cannes. Having completed some renovation on the house, in February 1927 Bonnard invited Matisse, who lived in Nice, to visit him. He wrote: ‘You will find our house on avenue Victoria, it is the highest street in the neighbourhood — the house is pink.’⁴ He and Marthe stayed often in Le Bosquet, and he painted many interiors and landscapes of the surrounding countryside. The Provençal Jug 1930 shows a detail of the mantelpiece in the so-called ‘small sitting room’ on the first floor of the house.

By 1931 Le Bosquet was Bonnard’s favourite place to work and in 1939 it became the couple’s permanent home. The house and its surroundings provided an ideal environment for the artist, who continued to paint studies of Marthe, often standing in the bathroom or lying in the tub. He also painted still lifes, self-portraits, interiors, and views onto the countryside from different windows and doors.

Bonnard produced over 200 paintings in Le Cannet.⁵ As the inspiration for his landscapes in particular and his work in general, he used sketches he made during daily walks in the countryside and notes he made of weather conditions. Early in February 1935 he wrote to Matisse: ‘Right now I stroll around the countryside and try to observe it like a farmer.’⁶

Mediterranean Landscape, Le Cannet1929–30 is typical of the landscapes Bonnard painted in the neighbourhood, and well documents his goal of condensing his daily experiences and thoughts. Unframed by any window or piece of architecture (except for a small bridge, obviously the bridge over the little Canal de la Siagne, close to his house), the rich foliage on either side of the picture creates a window that opens out through the centre of the canvas to show the Esterel mountains in the distance.

Instead of finishing one canvas before starting a new one, Bonnard worked simultaneously on different paintings, comparing them with each other and often completing them only after long periods of reflection. He might tack a nude, an interior, a landscape, and a self-portrait to the walls of his studio at the one time, constantly forcing himself to consider different outcomes, multiple ideas and solutions. The acts of creation and decision making became longer and longer toward the end of his career, not only because of his own critical attitude but because of the political circumstances of occupied France during World War II, which led to his voluntary exile in Le Cannet where his scope of action, his universe, became quite narrow and introverted.

If there is one motif that expresses Bonnard’s reclusive situation in an exemplary way, it is the small tiled bathroom at Le Bosquet, with Marthe lying stretched out or kneeling in the tub as if captured, exposed to the play of light and of reflected colour which transforms the space.

For Nude Crouching in the Bath 1940 Bonnard used sketches he had made in his diary two years earlier. Marthe’s dramatically cropped body is full of energy — its confinement in the tub does not detract from the dynamism of the composition. The work has an overpowering simplicity, and counterbalances the more abstract solutions in Bonnard’s similar paintings of this motif. On another level Nude Crouching in the Bath stands more for a notion of regeneration and resurrection. This is perhaps Bonnard’s strongest message to posterity in his late work.⁷

During the war years Bonnard was struck by ill fate. He lost his friend Vuillard in 1940, Marthe died in 1942, then Denis in 1943 and Roussel in 1944. Bonnard was overwhelmed by sadness and despair. He had painted self-portraits all his life, but it was only in the 1930s that he developed a real interest in depicting himself in front of a mirror — in his Self-portrait of 1945, which is considered his last self-portrait, he showed himself without indulgence or pity.

Another of the last paintings Bonnard worked on is Almond Tree in Blossom of c.1945, an enigmatic image showing a white-flowering tree in the plot of land the artist bought to enlarge his garden at Le Cannet in 1927. He could observe the almond tree continuously from his bedroom window and has painted a symbol of the perpetual renewal and regeneration of nature; it is also a sign of transience and death. Although Almond Tree in Blossom and the late Self-portrait are iconographically quite different, they seem stylistically close. Most obviously there is the downy colour, and the out-of-focus rendering that avoids any clear forms.

For Almond Tree in Blossom there is another parallel. In the Romantic, Barbizon School and Impressionist periods, trees were rich symbols of cultural and historical identity and continuity; Bonnard has expanded this meaning. More than the late Self-portrait, Almond Tree in Blossom is a kind of compilation of the artist’s last messages, his legacy, the symbol of his consciousness, his goal of ‘giving life to painting’⁸ and his permanent claim of being ‘in constant contact with nature’.⁹

Jörg Zutter

Context and Contribution

Pierre Bonnard’s distinction as an artist is, in part, that his work cannot be easily categorised — it is not religious, or symbolic, or expressionist, or abstract, or surrealist, but remains quietly what it is. Nor does Bonnard force us to take notice with a manifesto, or a theory, or dramatic or bizarre depictions.

A keen observer of the life around him, Bonnard was alert to the changing moods of nature and of people and their surroundings. These ‘adventures of the optic nerve’, as he called his observations, were translated into carefully structured compositions filled with paint strokes of luminous colour. Rather than imposing himself on nature and reordering it in a radical manner, Bonnard opened himself to nature, observing its intricate detail.

He was particularly interested in intimate moments in which people are involved in a domestic setting — capturing them sitting in chairs, dressing, looking in the mirror, playing with children or pets, in the garden — innocently and unself-consciously immersed in their everyday world. This aspect of his work, and similar work by his friend Edouard Vuillard, was called Intimisme.

Bonnard’s Working Methods

For his compositions Bonnard often used quite a strong geometric framework filled in with all-over patterns painted in a deceptively rough or careless manner. What underlying order there is becomes disorder, everything seems to quaver or shimmer. He showed little regard for the laws of perspective, modelling and even anatomy. Gustave Geffroy, writing in Le Journal, in 1899 noted that he painted everything ‘with an apparent negligence, a kind of disorder, which soon reveals the very delightful spirit of a painter who can harmonize’.

Bonnard did not simply record the world around him. One of his fellow Nabis, Jan (later Dom Willibrord) Verkade, said of Bonnard that: ‘he loved to work by instinct: with impassioned brush strokes, controlled only remotely by intellect and will’. That observation may help to explain Bonnard’s adoption of awkward placement, angular motifs and abrupt cropping, and his occasional distortion and exaggeration of the forms of his models.

Also contributing to his departures from the strictly visible is the rather astonishing fact that Bonnard worked exclusively from memory. While he observed everything, with his camera, or in his diary or on scraps of paper that he carried with him, when it came to painting even his portraits were done in the absence of the model. Most surprisingly of all, Marthe, his partner and model for almost 50 years, seldom formally posed for him.

Defending this work method, Bonnard explained that having the actual subject in front of him would distract him from his work. His art was always the result of an initial attraction to something: ‘If this attraction, this primary conception fades away, the painter becomes dominated solely by the motif, the object before him. From that moment he ceases to create his own painting.’

Another unconventional aspect to Bonnard’s process was his selection of unusually shaped canvases. Seldom did he choose the standard rectangular format, often selecting elongated or square shapes. He painted on unstretched canvas pinned to the wall of whatever room he was using as a studio — sometimes it was a hotel room — and he often worked on more than one canvas at the same time. He liked the canvas to have a larger dimension than the picture he was planning. Stretchers, he believed, imposed a limit to the composition.

Characteristics of Bonnard’s Painting Style

‘The main subject is the surface’, wrote Bonnard, ‘which has its colour, its laws, over and above the objects.’ He sought to extend the Impressionist’s experiments, interpreting nature through more structured compositions and exploiting the expressive characteristics of colour. The sense of mystery and secrecy in many of his paintings, where the figures are turned away or their faces are in shadow, links back to Bonnard’s early association with the Nabis — a group of young artists, one of whose aims was to explore spiritual meaning in their art.

Reflecting on the lasting inspiration on his art of Japanese woodblock prints, Bonnard commented: ‘I realized that colour could express everything … with no need for relief or texture. I understood that it was possible to translate light, shapes and character by colour alone, without the need for values’ — in other words, without the need for tones of light and dark, or shading and the modelling of forms.

What is significantly different about Bonnard’s paintings is that they take time to view — as they took time to paint. Often lacking a focal point, the activity may take place on the periphery. He rejected standard approaches — a landscape may have no horizon or sky, but be like a room enclosed by textured foliage.

From about 1900 until his death in 1947 Bonnard’s style hardly changed. He appeared to ignore the theories and schools that surrounded him — such as Fauvism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism. It has recently been said that: ‘with the growing exuberance, colour and sensuality of his paintings, he confounded the history of modernism with radical unradicalism’ (James Panero).

Paris

Paris in the 1890s was the centre of the modern world. In 1889 the city had staged the Exposition universelle, a world’s fair organised to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution and to boost the national economy and culture — to mark the event, engineer Gustave Eiffel built his 300-metre tower.

Early work, the Nabis

A number of still lifes, portraits, domestic interiors and street scenes from the 1890s reveal Bonnard’s early talent as a painter who translated his observations of the life around him into highly subjective compositions. Eager to capture striking phenomena for his art, his eyes were continuously moving, literally hunting for new images, transposing into his work the vibrant, irregular rhythm and cultural momentum of Paris.

Bonnard, who had begun to study law in 1887, also attended art classes at the Académie Julian in Paris. With a number of other young art students, he was co-founder of a group called the Nabis (from the Hebrew word for prophets), who sought to foster a new aesthetic — a poetic transposition of form and colour. They particularly admired Paul Gauguin’s expressive use of colour. The Nabis included Paul Sérusier, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Aristide Maillol and Félix Vallotton.

The cosmopolitan spirit and new lifestyle of the city is reflected in work produced at the time by Bonnard and his Nabi friends. They introduced decorative pictorial motifs borrowed from contemporary design; they responded to the bold flat colours of the currently popular Japanese woodblock prints; they were inclined to move between subjects, ranging from images of their fast-moving urban surroundings to quieter scenes of leisure at home or in country retreats. For them, art embraced all areas of human life, including the cultural pursuits of an urban society — literature, theatre, music, dance, photography, applied art, interior design and fashion design.

Japonisme

In 1854 Japan’s two centuries of isolation from the rest of the world came to an end, and the West discovered a completely new aesthetic with the influx of Japanese art and traditional objects. In 1890 in Paris, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, an exhibition of the history of Japanese woodblock prints featured more than 700 prints from private collections in Paris. The exhibition inspired in Bonnard what would be a life-long interest — he came to be known by his friends as le nabi très japonard (the very Japanese Nabi).

Much later Bonnard recalled the impact of the exhibition:

I realized that colour could express everything, as it did in this exhibition, with no need for relief or texture. I understood that it was possible to translate light, shapes and character by colour alone, without the need for values.

The inspiration of Japanese woodblock prints is apparent in the flat, bold colours and the delineation of forms in Bonnard’s early work, with his cropping of forms a lasting characteristic.

From 1893 onwards the linear style of Bonnard’s early Nabi paintings gradually gave way to a more painterly visual approach. His figures are no longer brought to life with an undulating line; instead their contours have become diffused and sketchy, merging into their surroundings. The broken and fragmented silhouette has become a vehicle for Bonnard to express in a very different way the corporeality and movement of his figures.

This manner of painting is particularly evident in Bonnard’s images of children — a favourite subject since becoming uncle to the children of his sister Andrée and her husband, the composer Claude Terrasse. Drawings and paintings vividly capture movement and sometimes humorous body language. Bonnard’s approach here owes much to the Japanese master Ando (Utagawa) Hiroshige, who explored in his prints the ever-changing poses of people going about their daily lives.

Le Grand-Lemps

The Bonnard family spent holidays in their house, Le Clos [The Enclosure], at Le Grand-Lemps in the Dauphiné, a rural region between Lyons and Grenoble. Bonnard’s stays there resulted in genre paintings, landscapes and photographs — recording his family at leisure.

Where Paris represented sophistication, ambition and encounters with all kinds of people, Bonnard’s experience at Le Grand-Lemps was just the opposite, and in that environment he developed his ideas for large-scale densely packed landscapes and the decorative schemes for which he received commissions from about 1900.

Décoration

Together with his Nabi friends, Bonnard’s creative ventures extended beyond easel painting to designing folding screens, furniture, ceramics and posters. He became sought-after as a painter of decorative panels depicting landscapes, parks, squares, boulevards or more fanciful subjects. These decorative works expanded the scope of traditional easel painting, often forming a large composite iconographic scheme conceived to fit a particular interior.

In 1910 the art critic, Louis Vauxcelles, enthusiastically summarised Bonnard’s decorative works:

M. Bonnard is fantasy, instinct, ingenuous spontaneity, French charm, both tender and mischievous. He delights the eye with attenuated colour harmonies suggesting the tones of faded tapestries, and iridescent pearly skin in semidarkness. His panels depict a thousand stories as entertaining as the thousand and one nights, portrayed with energy.

Nudes

Bonnard’s approach to the female body was unorthodox and openly sensual. In sharp contrast to his depictions of bourgeois country life, leisure and children’s games in the garden of Le Clos, Bonnard painted almost risqué images of nudes. In his Paris studio, and in the house he had rented outside the city at Morval, Bonnard painted his lover and muse Marthe (Maria Boursin, whom he met in 1893, but did not marry until 1925). He took photographs of Marthe to serve as studies for paintings where she is depicted in various poses, but always (even in paintings as late as 1940) with a slender body, long legs, narrow waist and firm breasts — and very often in the bathroom.

Vernonnet

Interiors

During the 1910s and thereafter Bonnard developed images of interiors that are very different to the private interiors of his Nabi years. Figures are now exposed to reality, presented as on a stage. Bonnard’s partner and model, Marthe, becomes an actress in an active and emancipated role, elegantly dressed and dominating the scene. Gas light is replaced by dazzling electric light. No children appear in these interiors.

Landscapes

In the 1920s Bonnard undertook fewer decorative projects, but took his decorative style beyond panels designed for specific interiors into the often large-scale landscapes that he had begun to paint in the village of Vernonnet, where he often worked in these years where, having acquired a little house, Ma Roulotte (My Caravan), in 1912.

Vernonnet is on the Seine near Vernon, a few kilometres west of Giverny, where Monet had lived and worked for almost 30 years. The two men became close friends. Unlike Monet’s garden, Bonnard’s was not carefully planned, but an overgrown lush jungle of wildflowers, bushes and trees.

Bonnard painted many views from Ma Roulotte, from his window and from the balcony. He depicted the colourful garden, the green fields, the treetops, the poplars, elms and willows that lined the riverbanks, the Seine with its boats. The impression of these all-over compositions is of a dense, panoramic view of an indefinite landscape.

In April 1924, a retrospective of Bonnard’s work at the Galerie Druet in Paris included 89 paintings dating from 1890 to 1922. The show attracted favourable criticism. The art critic Elie Faure characterised well the originality of Bonnard’s art: 

Like the rarest artists, he gives the impression of having invented painting. This is not merely because everything in the world — everything, every day — is new to him and so he expresses it in a new way, but also because he stands at the dawn of a new intellectual order. He was the first to organise it, following a rhythm of which we had been unaware before his arrival: the fine old harmonies that make us what we are.

Le Cannet

In the summer of 1909, Bonnard worked for the first time on the Mediterranean coast — at St Tropez. He was following the example of other painters of his generation — Paul Signac, Henri Matisse, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet — whose art had been influenced by the Mediterranean light and environment of the South of France. The discovery of this radiant light and luminous colour, so different from northern Europe, was a key experience for Bonnard and he returned to this region year after year, living there from 1939.

While Bonnard continued to work and exhibit in Paris, he travelled abroad and spent long periods in Vernonnet and northern France. Then in 1926 he bought a house in Le Cannet, on the Côte d’Azur not far from Cannes and Nice, where his friend Matisse lived. By 1931 the house at Le Cannet, called Le Bosquet (The Grove), was Bonnard’s favourite place to work. In 1939 it became his permanent home from which he seldom travelled. He produced more than 200 paintings and dozens of drawings at Le Cannet. — studies of Marthe, often standing in the bathroom or lying in the tub; still lifes; self-portraits; interiors; and views onto the countryside from various windows and doors.

Le Cannet was crucial to the evolution of Bonnard’s notion of landscape. In March 1935 he confided to his friend Edouard Vuillard:

I have become a landscape painter … because I have acquired the soul of a landscape painter and have begun to get rid of the picturesque, the aesthetic, and other conventions that have poisoned me.

The acts of creation became longer and longer towards the end of Bonnard’s life, not only because of his self-critical attitude but also because of the political circumstances of occupied France during World War II, which led to his virtual exile in Le Cannet where he became quite introverted. If there is one motif that expresses Bonnard’s reclusive situation in an exemplary way it is the small tiled bathroom at Le Bosquet, with Marthe lying stretched out or kneeling in the tub, as if captured, exposed to the play of light and reflected colour that transforms the space into a place of mysterious regeneration and recreation.